Prettier output

[leumasme]

I've previously used Insect but would like to switch to fend for various reasons.
Something that was immediately obvious is that Insect's output is prettier (although way larger).
A small comparison:


This is with fend already configured to use some color as by default it would be almost exclusively white

[colors]
number = { foreground = 'cyan' }
string = { foreground = 'green' }
identifier = { foreground = 'white', bold = true }
keyword = { foreground = 'yellow', bold = true, underline = true }
built-in-function = { foreground = 'magenta', bold = true }
date = { foreground = 'red' }
other = { foreground = '256:200' }

Maybe I'm just not enough of a cli user to appreciate fend's compactness, but to me, insect's output looks way nicer and easier to read:

• the error message is colored and formatted over multiple lines at useful points
• it spells out the output unit (ton instead of t)
• it has a pretty and colorful default theme
• it echos its interpretation of the input (which may be somewhat useful to catch misinterpretations)
• it puts a newline above and below the output, making it easier to recognize different inputs

It would be great if we could have something like this as an option in fend too!

[printfn]

You’re right, that other output does look much nicer than what fend currently has. Maybe some of the verbosity does go a little bit too far, at least when there aren’t any errors, but especially the error messages are way more user-friendly I feel like.

I’m not sure how much time I have to improve all of this in the near future, but I’d happily accept PRs!